Page 2 of A Kiss of Hammer and Flame (Fated for Hael #1)
At the heart of the realm’s fallen empire, the capital of Hael’stromia lay dormant.
From afar, the obsidian pyramid loomed so high above its pike-mounted barriers that they felt quaint.
But up close, the fortress city was a monster, rooted like petrified wood in ancient sands, its pyramid’s three corners pointing with ominous, skeletal fingers towards the warring sister kingdoms of Kolyath, Luminaux and Ozumbre.
The pyramid – the capital’s palace and temple – stood as a monument to past glory.
But it was not Hael’stromia’s keeper. Within the pyramid’s colossal structure, swathed in the silence of unrelenting years, of death, stirred a weapon fuelled by magicks older than the capital’s jet sands.
A weapon that the tri-kingdoms of Kolyath, Luminaux and Ozumbre had each battled to control for generations.
A weapon; not an inanimate tool of force, but an immortal, born of the Netherworld beyond the earthly plane. A being with the powers to shape or shatter worlds.
Not merely ‘a’ weapon.
The weapon.
Hael.
The flaming eye sockets of Hael’stromia’s weapon flickered open, guttering as if his fires starved of air. A mortal concern that Hael found almost laughable, for the Netherworld’s infernal bonfires fed him still. As had the suffering ripped from the skeletons around him.
Hael’s imposing form arose from the black sandstone of his altar.
Arcane power rippled within him, and like an asp perceiving the faintest tremors in the air, he extended his mystical senses beyond the room, his shrine and its stone columns etched with the tales of his death and rebirth.
Bound to the Netherworld, his magicks enabled him to feel the slightest whispers of dark energy in this, his sacred domain, and the passages of the capital’s pyramid.
But there was nothing; no Oracles, no scrying Seers of any kind.
Hael frowned, pondering. Hael’stromia was a necropolis yet. Why had he awoken?
Not a soul had dared to goad the capital’s walls in several years, leaving him the warden of long-departed memories, now faded into myths.
He had not sensed the warmth of another life form’s presence for so long that it aroused in him a near-forgotten ache for the world beyond his confines, beyond the solitude and roaring silence.
Springing soundlessly to his feet, Hael blinked, the sensation in his eye sockets akin to the stinging of crushed glass.
Despite the pain and crypt-like darkness, his vision was perfect.
Hael beheld his pallid skin, delicate as moonlit paperbark, a labyrinth of inky veins pulsing beneath the surface.
His fragility laughed in the face of the centuries that had tried and failed to end him, ravaging his immortal form.
Hael stilled himself, seeking a remnant in the ashes, an ember of his unspeakable powers. His destruction.
But, again, there was nothing.
A thread of frustration unspooled within him. He was a blade in its sheath without a call to arms, locked in this, his chamber, until the prophecy transpired.
The prophecy. A phrase deeply entwined with his existence, for the last High Oracles had foretold the rise of both a new Scion and the pyramid that served as palatial temple.
And, of course, Hael – the dark weapon of the tri-kingdom empire, bound to the destiny of its capital of Hael’stromia.
The prophecy’s fulfilment promised change, an end to civil war.
Without it, the realm’s divisions would persist.
But not forever.
‘For when the Seers reappear,
When the Key has been bestowed,
When the mark walks the path to enter the Nether in
life,
Then shall Hael rise again.’
Hael had been awaiting the first omen of the prophecy, ‘ For when the Seers reappear ’, as long as he had been sealed inside this room. When the following two omens were enacted, he would be liberated, free to defend his empire’s city seat, this pyramid, the capital restored.
But in four centuries, nothing had come to pass. Certainly no Scion.
Nothing but war between the three kingdoms it was his duty to protect.
His core burned with anticipation. How much longer must he endure?
Retreating to his resting place, he settled into the comforting embrace of cool stone in the blackness of his cage. Awaiting the first omen of the prophecy, Hael was at time’s mercy, as he had been for the past 400 years. His undying watch had been one of isolation.
Fortuitously, as the weapon, he was well acquainted with isolation. Perhaps too well.
All of a sudden, a slender beam of radiant white light cleaved the shadows, emanating from beyond the sealed doors of his shrine, vibrant and alive.
Could it be—
The light dissipated and Hael’s stomach lurched as his supernatural eyes saw a vision: not a man, as was customary, but a woman, her eyes as fierce as a battle-hardened warrior’s.
She held a drawing of an olden sigil that he recognised immediately.
Hael’s desiccated heart, bound as it was to service, stirred with a profound curiosity.
And, strangely, the longing for earthly company. The feeling took him by surprise, anticipation igniting in his chest.
Who was she?
Was this mystery human female the one, his future Scion master? How – and why?
Had the Oracles foretold this young woman, a divergence to shatter centuries of convention? Could she be the harbinger of revolution he had awaited for so long?
With a sizzle and a spark, the fires of Hael’s eyes roared into a soaring onyx inferno.
Power blazed through him, the room’s air crackling, his thousand-year-old body erupting as an occult flame wreathed his form.
This is it. Hael could not see the woman’s face, and he did not know her name.
But he would, he vowed. He would solve the riddle of the human woman who had roused him from his slumber.
He parted his lips and a word rumbled through the void, sacred and resonant.
A promise whispered to the enveloping darkness.
A promise that the foul regimes of the past, the present, were drawing to a close.
‘ Scion… ’
The new era, a new Scion, beckoned. And as destiny whispered throughout the veil, Hael knew, with a surge of escalating darkness, that it would soon be time to rise.
The prophecy had finally begun.